Les Moonves, president of CBS Corp., was in Austin on Monday to receive an award from the University of Texas and give a lecture called “The Networks Strike Back: How Old Media Has Adapted to the New World.” According to Mark Coddington's blog:
It was exactly what you’d guess from the title: A full-throated defense of the broadcast networks’ vitality in a media landscape where new media companies like Google, Apple, Amazon and Netflix are making most of the headlines and shaping most of the media consumption.
Moonves’ talk could have been subtitled: “It’s still the content, stupid.” His argument was simple: All these devices and platforms may be changing the way we consume media, but they’re not changing the content we consume on that media. Well-produced, high-quality content will win out on any platform, and the deep-pocketed networks (CBS in particular, of course) are still the ones producing that “professional content” without which the new-media innovations wouldn’t have any real value.
Moonves on the half-hour evening newscast. CBS will always produce a nightly evening newscast, Moonves said, as it’s “part of our agreement with the American people that we will do that.” But he sees the form of that newscast changing radically — and probably soon.
He tossed out the idea of turning the evening news into more of a Nightline-style in-depth examination of one or two issues, or an extended discussion a la Face the Nation.
Some of the reason for those changes is the fact that by the time people get home in the evening, they already know the day’s news, Moonves said. But another key factor is cost. Moonves said repeatedly that the model of maintaining costly foreign bureaus and a sizable reporting staff primarily to feed only a half-hour daily news show isn’t a good one, and CBS hasn’t been doing it as well since its extensive cuts over the past several years. A nightly show based on fewer issues or commentary would be much cheaper — though an often-discussed merger with CNN (which Moonves referenced without going into specifics) would change those economics quite a bit, too.
“The Katie Couric deal will be the last big deal of that kind ever done. … Those days are over, because the news no longer generates the kind of revenue or success that’s worth doing [those contracts].”
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